Indigenous biocultural rights and the Blue Mountains: Local and international policy challenges

Indigenous knowledges play a critical role in addressing the environmental crisis, and the United Nations system has adopted a suite of international treaties to protect and strengthen Indigenous peoples’ rights, which are often described as biocultural rights. Because World Heritage Areas are nominated and monitored by UNESCO, an initial hypothesis in this study was that such areas would be subject to higher than normal standards in regard to Indigenous people’s biocultural rights. By reference to the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, Australia, this research examined how the international legislative framework influences conservation practices. We held semi-structured interviews with conservation and Indigenous local experts and compared park management practices in the Area against those used in an Indigenous Protected Area. Findings align with the literature and suggest that Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems can generate new insights for the Area and other sites. Yet, Indigenous knowledges are only marginally applied in practice. Some barriers to full participation of Indigenous people are specific to the colonial history of the area. Yet, findings point to a lack of action by Australian governments and UNESCO, and that needs to be redressed. The study calls attention to the need to support and resource Indigenous people to enable collaborative partnerships to yield significant benefits for biodiversity and protection of Country.     

The Experiences of a Polish Family from the Eastern Borderlands (1914–1921): The Protassewiczes of Borki

ABSTRACT

This article examines how two generations of a large Polish landed family from the Grodno governorate in the Russian Empire were affected by the political and social upheavals brought about by World War One, the Russian Revolution, the threat of Bolshevism, and the rebirth of a Polish state. The Protassewiczes, like other landed noble families in the region, despite their Polish- Lithuanian identity, enjoyed a privileged social status in tsarist Russia. Marriage and work took many of the family’s members to Wilno (Vilnius) and Siberia, while a younger member studied in Austrian Galicia where he joined Pi?sudski’s organisation. The article describes the evacuation to Taganrog in 1915 of the senior Protassewicz and his subsequent return to Borki in 1918 to face the ensuing Polish-Soviet War. Two members of the family who were engaged in railway building in Siberia met a tragic end. The younger generation participated in Polish military efforts in the east in 1919–21 and adapted successfully to life in restored Poland. Attention is paid to issues of national identity raised by rival Polish and Lithuanian claims to Wilno in the context of the fall of empires and the emergence of new national states.     

Airborne prawns and decayed rice: food politics in Wartime Chongqing

ABSTRACT

This article explores the multilayered dimensions of food politics in wartime Chongqing. A substantial number of wartime Chongqing dwellers were migrants who flocked to the city, having evacuated from coastal China to follow the Nationalists after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. They could not simply be called refugees. Rather, they were sophisticated urbanites known by Chongqing natives as “downriver folks” who brought their political awareness and cultural tastes to the new wartime capital. Some introduced their sumptuous dining culture to Chongqing, thereby provoking a public sense of deprivation, while others brought organizational skills with which to turn public discontent into a political issue. This article argues that an increasing sense of deprivation stemming from the deterioration of the food situation in the city, if seemingly less significant than massive rural famine, became more consequential in the long run than any other political issue in the subsequent Civil War years.     

The “tribal spirit” in modern Britain: evolution,nationality, and race in the anthropology of Sir Arthur Keith

ABSTRACT

This article re-examines the anthropological scholarship of Sir Arthur Keith (1866–1955), who served as the president of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1914–1917), the Royal Anatomical Society (1918), and the British Association of the Advancement of Science (1927), who wrote prolifically on anatomy, evolution, and the idea of race. While most commonly associated with the Piltdown man hoax, Keith's contributions to the discipline were far greater and more complex. This essay specifically considers how Keith sought to problematize the concept of the nation, considering the nation-state as an evolutionary unit. The first half of this essay examines Keith's theories on the mechanism of evolution (hormonal instincts) and how this informed his ideas of races and nations as evolutionary units. The second half of the essay considers how Keith deployed his ideas about evolutionary instincts, with the goal of advising Britons about how an evolutionary perspective would help understand, if not resolve, modern political challenges, both international and domestic, that faced the British Empire around the time of the First World War.     

St Stephen's in War and Peace: Civil Defence and the Location of Parliament, 1938–51

This essay takes a new look at the destruction and the rebuilding of the house of commons during the 1940s. It argues that behind the home front bravado of the Palace of Westminster steadfastly enduring the blitz lay secret plans for rehousing MPs away from aerial bombardment, contingency scenarios that were then updated after 1945 in the event of attack on London by atomic weapons. The essay also suggests that threats to the security of parliament, together with the necessity to rebuild the Commons, were turned by the coalition government into an opportunity to refashion parliamentary politics in such a way that the two‐party system was restored, along the traditional lines of government and opposition that had become blurred since 1931.     

Introduction: Marginalised Histories of the Second World War1

This special issue, stemming out of the AHRC-funded Teaching and Learning War Research Network (2017–2020), is published at an important juncture in cultural memory: as the focus of public commemorative events in Britain and the Commonwealth shifts from the First to the Second World War, including the Holocaust. Not only does it showcase exciting and cutting-edge research, but it also aims to stimulate conversation and ‘forward-thinking’ about commemorative cycles over the next two-and-a-half decades (2025–2045). The three research articles and four provocations focus, in different ways, on the question of ‘hidden histories’ in the expectation of a need to ensure that diversity, multi-perspectivity, complexity, and contention remain at the heart of ‘national’ commemorative processes (whether in Britain or elsewhere).     

‘The sea shall have our weapons’: small arms and forced migration across the Baltic Sea during the Second World War

ABSTRACT

During the Second World War, a large number of guns were brought to Sweden by refugees escaping the occupation powers of the eastern Baltic countries. Most people had very limited space for bringing belongings with them, but small arms were apparently highly prioritised when setting out – yet, at the same time, they were usually disposed of in the course of the crossing. Informed by Latours’ thoughts on hybrid actors, this paper explores the relationship between humans and arms during the escape across the Baltic Sea in 1943–45. It is shown that although they were seldom fired, the physical presence of these arms directly affected human action, perception and identities, and that it did so in different ways during different phases of the crossing.     

Women beneath the Surface: Coal and the Colonial State in India during the Second World War

In British India in 1943, a rapidly escalating Allied coal crisis resulted in the lifting of a six-year-old ban on women’s employment underground. Over 70,000 low-caste and adivasi (indigenous) women, battling the war-induced Bengal Famine, sustained production levels and prevented the monthly loss of 385,000 tons of coal between August 1943 and February 1946. Their employment sparked unprecedented outrage among the public, in the press, and in parliaments, generating a transnational discourse on Indian women workers for the very first time. Meanwhile the desperate colonial government disciplined miners through the threat of starvation, information that has so far remained concealed.     

Profiteering in Australia during the First World War

The effect of domestic profiteering on Australia’s war effort and economy is a field still under-represented in historical research. This paper discusses how Australian governments struggled to come to grips with profiteering and public perception of the problem during the First World War. It is also a plea for military historians and others to move beyond the Gallipoli and Anzac perspective that still dominates this field and to look at other issues that were important during the war but which remain under-studied.     

Noble Traditions and Christian Principles: The Integral Spirituality of Bernard Narokobi

ABSTRACT

This article describes some of the major events in the Catholic Church in Papua New Guinea (PNG) following the Second Vatican Council, the ‘self study’ of the church in PNG in the 1970s, and the General Assembly of 2003–4. An outcome of the self study was the establishment of a national Catholic council in which Bernard Narokobi played a significant role. The article continues with a reflection on how Narokobi’s promotion of Melanesian spirituality finds links with a Catholic theology of grace and sacrament and how these two contribute to his understanding of the dual pillars of the PNG Constitution with its noble traditions and Christian principles coming together in the ideal of integral human development. The article lays out different ways Bernard Narokobi was formally involved with the church over his lifetime and how his bringing together of Melanesian experience and Christian faith provided a model for the integral liberation he envisaged and expressed – both in his work in the church and in the National Goals and Directive Principles of the PNG Constitution.